High Impact Teams - Engineering Culture

I have always wondered what makes a group of people (either cross-functional or similar skills) become high performant or a High Impact team.

Google researchers wanted to understand the secrets of effective teams. Hence, the researchers initiatied a project code-named Project Aristotle, following the quote:

the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

They found that great teams are not driven by free lunches, great benefits, or wonderful salaries. What really mattered was less about who is in the team but more about how the team works together. They devised five traits of an effective

Five traits of an effective team:

• Psychological safety: a belief that a team is safe for risk-taking and not seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive
• Dependability: which has been one of the important guiding principles - Predictability
• Structure and clarity: clarity of responsibilities, direction, and objectives.
• Meaning: personal and can vary: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression
• Impact: seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals and can help reveal impact.

These traits are heavily dependent on the culture of the organisation - a topic that has fascinated me, because I have been in a few transformative journeys including building an Engineering setup from scratch. But, let me first explain how I define culture.

What is culture?

It is important to understand what is culture (a term that is used loosely for behaviors in the organisation).

To me:

Culture is an outcome of principles and corresponding practices followed by the team (or an organisation)

It won’t be wrong to say, culture drives how a team (or an ogranisation) responds to challenges (internal or external) and opportunities it encounters.

Communication flows

One of the other important measures of culture is communication flows. Commnication has 3 aspects to a recepient: relevance, timeliness & appropriateness. Hence, it won’t be wrong to say, information flow is driven by typology of the organisation. I came across an interesting paper on organisational typology. The paper describes 3 typologies:

1. Pathological: communication stops due to political reasons (power or glory)
2. Bureaucratic: communication moves slowly due to ogranisational boundaries (rules, position, departmental fences)
3. Generative: communication concentrates on the mission and arrives to the relevant people fastest

Good communication flow builds cooperation, creativity, and safety.

How typology impacts the traits of effective teams

Typology of an organisation drives activities such as communication, cooperation, innovation, and problem solving. Let’s look at how typology impacts the traits of effective teams.

Psychological safety

When things go wrong:

• pathological setup encourage finding a scapegoat
• bureaucratic organisation seek justice. Thinking may stop at the department’s turf because of the mindset: it is not my concern
• the generative ones tries to discover the root cause within the system (strives to be blameless). People are encouraged to speak up, think outside the box, and to act as fully conscious participants in a great cooperative enterprise

Structure and clarity

• in pathological power struggles are the focus of awareness
• bureaucratic setup constricts awareness by personal or departmental function
• in a generative organisation, team members are made aware about the situation - what is happening and why.

Meaning and Impact

• in pathological organisations, alignment is typically with a person or a clique.
• in a bureaucratic organisation, alignment with the person’s own unit or function takes preference over alignment with the mission.
• in a generative organisation, alignment takes place through identification with the mission.

What practices shape an Engineering Culture?

Both Project Aristotle & the paper explain how communication shapes three key variables: alignment, awareness, and empowerment.

Let’s come back to the statement:

Culture is an outcome of principles and corresponding practices followed by the team (or an organisation)

What practices matter?

Some of the engineering practices that really matter

• Pair programming, TDD, RFC (& ADR),
• Write testable code
• Run the build and tests in a CI process
• Use test pyramids. Read this wonderful article by Martin Fowler
• Build once, promote further (deploy automatically or by the click of a button)
• Error and exception handling (system, business, integration)
• Make your systems Observable (and auditable)
• Performance and Security are features in the backlog (took a lot of time for us to bring this practice in-place, still WIP)
• Infrastructure and configurations are code (run them in a fully automated pipeline)
• Blameless post-mortems
• Brown bag sessions (knowledge sharing)

Behavrioral practices

• Coaching & mentoring (1:1s)
• Earn trust
• Celebrate differences
• Open door policy
• Obligation to dissent
• Team over Individual
• Idea over hierarchy

People/ capability related practices

• 360 performance management
• Career Ladder
• Open Source (meet-ups, conferences, webinar)
• Meritocratic environment
• Diversify talent

Conclusion

To build an environment of safety and culture (engineering), you have to actually mean it and live it! It’s always about PEOPLE, there is no culture without the people. It is by them and for them.

There are some important questions that I leave behind:

• Can different functions in an organisation have different culture?
• How does culture attract talent? How do you define culture to an interviewee?
• Can you tangibly measure culture?
• Do company values have influence on culture?
• Can you document culture?

Culture (including Engineering) keeps on evolving

Do it only if you feel passionate about

                                YOU TOUCH IT, YOU IMPROVE IT

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